[Chapter-delegates] What should ISOC's future goals be? How can we work toward achieving them as ISOC Chapters?

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:27:05PM +0000, Franca Palazzo wrote:
>Whatever the decision as to goals, there should be a bucket for Chapters' to use for issues that are specific to their jurisdictions.  These can't be anticipated a year in advance.  In many cases, we are reacting to whatever crazy legislation proposals the current gov't tables.  In order to influence policy we need funds to hold events that promote the consultations and submissions done by our policy committee.
>

I understand and sympathise with this suggestion, but it would actually be quite dangerous for the Internet Society and possibly for certain chapters, for two reasons:

1.  Actively funding what might qualify as lobbying campaigns under US law would endanger the Internet Society's charitable status.  US charities are tightly constrained as to what lobbying activities they can engage in, and we can't just have a pool of money that is generally open for funding such issues.  (This is in no way to minimise the importance of chapters reacting to legislation -- in the recent Canadian case, indeed "crazy", in my opinion.)  The penalties for messing this up are pretty serious, up to and including revocation of public charity status, and we just cannot possibly allow that to happen.  (For instance, if we were to lose our public charity status, all of our supporting organizations, including PIR, would automatically be affected.  PIR's legal status has implications for its contract with ICANN, so this is not a small matter.  In addition, if we lost our charity status that would immediately affect the IETF, which would also be bad.)

2.  Chapters are legally separate organizations, and if they are automatically eligible for funding for their political (not necessarily "lobbying", note) activities this could affect either the legal reality or the perception of that independence.  From the Internet Society point of view, of course, this might not be so bad, but I have always had the impression that chapters guard their independent status pretty jealously; so we would not wish to do anything to impugn that.

With my CEO hat on, I will say that the first of these is more important to me as a corporate officer; but it's certainly not something that is trivial to work around.  Some other organizations set up other kinds of affiliated entities that are designed to do lobbying (but that have very different rules related to how they are funded).  It might be useful for chapter leaders to express to the board how they might feel about such an arrangement.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
President & CEO, Internet Society
sullivan at isoc.org
+1 416 731 1261